and floor, seeping through the hay and wood, staining it forever with her life force. I race forward, firing again and again at the creature, which jerks and laughs as my gun clicks that it is empty.
With a scream trapped in my throat, I watch my wife’s dying body crumple to the ground as the creature spins to face me, its fangs flashing in the night, its chin covered in my wife’s and child’s blood as it taunts me.
“Do you want to die with them?” it questions, its voice strange, rasping around the fangs I can’t help but stare at. We have all heard the stories, believing them to be nothing more than tales to scare children, but before me stands a creature from myth…mocking my pain and loss as my wife and child’s bodies lie broken around us.
I grab my shells with shaking hands and try to reload the gun, but my eyes keep going back to Antoinette to see her gaze locked on me as tears roll down her beautiful face, her neck still pumping blood onto the floor. The creature laughs again and is suddenly before me. It knocks the gun out of my hand, and I watch it tumble to the ground out of reach. Dragging my eyes from my lost weapon, I meet the bottomless pits of the creature before me. I stare at it helplessly, my eyes defiant. I will not flinch in the face of death, my time was up many a year ago, only luck has kept me alive to this day. To see my dearest bear our child, watch her grow, and now watch her fall. Oh, this world is cruel. It is my time to go, I will join them on the other side.
“Kill me, creature, and I will rejoin them once again. I do not fear death, I have seen it on the battlefields,” I snarl, my head tilted back, arms straight and back proud. A soldier in the face of a nightmare.
It laughs once again, its eyes flashing in the night as the light goes out and plunges us into darkness. “No, my pet, I think I will do something much worse to you…”
A noise brings me back from the edge, a mocking laugh like the one in my memories, following me into the present. I hang there, limp in their chains, my mind shattered and falling apart, my body dying, crumbling into itself like a skeleton. My bones are brittle, my skin like parchment paper, tearing and old. My fangs throb, and my mouth is dry and screaming with a thirst so strong I have never faced anything like it before. I had tried to stop once, to sustain myself on animal blood, but this...this is so much more.
I am nothing beyond the thirst coursing through my body.
I let it fill me, guide me, make me until I am feral. I thought I was strong enough to face this, to die with dignity and not give in to their wants and demands, but this thirst is stronger than I could have ever imagined, and it will not let me just waste away. It will pull me back, kicking and screaming, and I know once I taste blood, I will be nothing more than that ravenous monster who killed those I held most dear and made me into what I am.
A monster.
I will bathe in blood with bodies drained around me until I come back to myself and the regret settles in, but in the haze, the red covering me at the moment, I don’t care. I would consume every single human in this city if it would quench this...this need.
The sound comes again, closer this time, and I recognise it through the blood gushing in my ears. Boots are heading this way, the tell-tale smack of the soles the only sound other than the human’s cries they throw in here. I know this time I will give in. They will throw me a blood bag, a human, and I will drain them, not stopping at just one, becoming their ravenous killer.
I brace myself, trying to stop my breathing, but I will still scent their fear, their blood, no matter what I do. It will not stop, I need to feed, it’s a craving so strong my head falls back and I let out a scream of grief and pain at becoming this monster. Reduced to a killer…
The door opens and I don’t allow myself to look, maybe